Marie-Luce Nadal
Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies /
Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst, April 17 – June 9 / V2_, September 19 – October 13 /
Curators: Zane Cerpina, Boris Debackere, Espen Gangvik, Florian Weigl.
Making the Clouds Cry (2015)
Madeleine Crossbow (from the “Making the Clouds Cry” outdoor performance) is a sculpture and instrument crafted by Marie-Luce Nadal. With welded metal, electric components, and repurposed bra wire, this weapon houses handmade cartridges that, when released into the sky, beckon the clouds to share their emotions. A poetic exploration of human connection to nature, this creation expresses the artist’s profound intention to merge art with the world’s emotions.
Vie d’Ailleurs (2022)
Vie d’Ailleurs is an artwork that embodies the harvesting and manifestation of pure cloud essence. This essence is extracted by Marie-Luce Nadal, an artist passionate about capturing natural phenomena.
Through regular practice, she collects this essence and redistributes it in enclosed environments, giving rise to a series of works called “Eoloriums.” The artwork “Vie d’Ailleurs” presented here is a captivating depiction of the collection of soil and a cloud, both harvested in Cambodia in 2022.
This evolving sculpture contains a captive cloud in perpetual motion. Under the watchful eye of the overhanging machine, the cloud appears and disappears, following an orchestrated movement. The contained atmosphere oxidizes, clouds, or clears, influenced by its surroundings.
The term “Eolorium” is a neologism coined by the artist, combining “Aeolus,” the god of winds in Greek mythology, with the Latin suffix “arium.”
This sculpture, reminiscent of a cloud aquarium, houses a captive fragment of land, a microcosm subject to the random will of air masses condensing into wisps.
Like an archivist, Marie-Luce Nadal collects the ephemeral to preserve it from the imprint of time.
Marie-Luce Nadal (FR) is a Franco-Catalan artist and researcher, born in 1984. Nadal draws inspiration from her viticultural roots and the land of Perpignan, where she grew up, to explore the intersection of myths, art, and science. Descended from a lineage of winemakers, she brings a poetic and scientific perspective to the mastery of the sky, inheriting the ancestral struggle of her grandfather against the elements. Nadal’s artistic endeavors transcend conventional boundaries. She is renowned for her performative machinic works, a fusion of plastic singularity, scientific inquiry, and technical viability. Her intention is not merely to create art but to provide objects that the audience can actively engage with or deploy. Nadal’s work is haunted by the direct impact of climatic phenomena, leading to a captivating exploration of meteorology and art within her creative universe.
marielucenadal.com
Header Graphics: “Making the Clouds Cry”, courtesy of the artist / Portrait photo: Andrew Brooke